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Listen to this story.

It is one of the most powerful Language Arts Moments in my early life.

Foresight, fate, tragedy, dream and language all mangled into one.

In 1983, here in Seattle, I worked for a few weeks transcribing the raw soundtrack of the noted documentary film Streetwise.

Streetwise is a harrowing and moving investigation of the lives of runaway street kids in a scene that revolved around the Pike Place Market. Made by photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her husband filmmaker Martin Bell, the film gives a heartbreaking portrayal of fragile kids and fragile relationships against a background of prostitution, drugs, and everyday violence. (For images and the text in book form, go here and click books, then Streetwise.)

I had just, days before, helped accomplish the literary/performance group Invisible Seattle's monumental Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle, by Seattle project, and was already particularly sensitized to the heft and materiality of language.

Via a typesetter who employed me for odd jobs I got the task of keyboarding daily sound cassettes from the filming in progress into pages of text. Mary Ellen herself would often rush in, breathless, and drop that day's conversations into my hands.

It was intense stuff. Fights, screaming matches, intimacies, startling confessions and a charged web of relationships between street kids, veteran hobos, pimps and cops.

"Tiny I betcha Dad's goin' start bitchin' at ya.

Pat [Tiny's Mom] No. 'Bout what?

Tiny Probably wondering if you was sleeping with Larry or not.

Pat Oh, Erin. For heaven's sake.

Tiny I'm not saying you did. But that's what he's gonna start bitchin' at you about.

Tiny (voice over)
He beats up on my mom. He broke her leg once. He doesn't work. He depends on my mom alot, which is not right. I think the man should support the woman. He says, 'She doesn't have any money.' And I say, 'It's because of you. You spend her money on beer. So she doesn't have time for me.' Now my mom's in a mess she can't get out of. I feel really sorry for her.

Tiny It'll be a year since you were married. A year has gone by fast, hasn't it? Huh? Mom?

Pat Yes. Don't bug me ... I'm drinkin'."

The raw soundtrack was much stronger than what made it in to the movie. The tapes contained so much evidence of illegal activity I started to get nervous about who might know I had them.

The key to my job was to be able to recognize the voices accurately. I strained at my headphones, building a mental image of each person, reaching for every linguistic sign.

I resolved from the outset to be absolutely faithful to the spoken language in my transcripts . . . every repetition. every hesitation and re-start, every customization of vocabulary. The book version of the project even says: ""The dialogue was rendered as spoken with special uses of words, irregularities of grammar and idiosyncratic syntax preserved to convey the individuality of each speaker."

It was a compelling, suspenseful, horrifying soap opera I listened to every day for 12 hours or more.

I would walk through the Market looking at all the street kids, trying to hear their voices, wondering Is that Tiny? Is that Rat? Is that Lulu?

The project ended. I moved from Seattle. A year or more later, the film came to town.

I bought a ticket, but I was utterly unprepared.

There on the screen were people I'd never seen before. But I knew everything they were going to say. Everything! Every inflection, every nuance, every hesitation.

Goosebumps. Racing heart. I saw and spelled each word in my mind . . . ellipses and apostrophes . . . a horrible, exquisite multi-layered language event . . . starring characters that in some sense I had written.

Awfully, I also knew their fates. I knew what was to come later in the film for each of them.

Except for one. Fragile little Dewayne, Dewayne of the quaking, breaking voice and courage beyond his years. Dewayne had died a few months after the main filming. The movie shows his funeral. I was devastated.

"INVISIBLE SEATTLE is the antidote to your feeling of completeness, to the illusion that the world ends at the city limits. . . . Beware of the invisible power of ideas. Every time you read a book you enter INVISIBLE SEATTLE." --- Philip Wohlstetter